russell bertrand -- The Conquest of Happiness

Happiness is a ver alluring emotion. It can be believed, that it is the driving emotion behind all human action. An understanding of this emotion could very well be at the heart of success, and as such throughout history much of human effort has been directed towards coming to a sound understanding of this mysterious feeling. Some of the most learned and most ingenious minds have tackled the problem, acquiring great scholarly fruits. The examples are tireless, from the works of froid to maslow, many psychologist have given the problem a try. This hub will feature an essay by Bertrand Russel entitled "The Conquest of Happiness". Bertrand Russel is perhaps the greatest scholar to have lived in the last century, his works are a triumph of human reasoning have shined light into many of the dark corners that we face as a species. Bellow you will find the first and last chapter of this essay, I hope you enjoy Russel's perspective on this very native and human topic.

Chapter 1: What makes people unhappy?

Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human
beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not,
at least in a great majority of cases. If you are unhappy yourself, you
will probably be prepared to admit that you are not exceptional in
this. If you are happy, ask yourself how many of your friends are so.
And when you have reviewed your friends, teach yourself the art of
reading faces; make yourself receptive to the moods of those whom you meet in the course of an ordinary day.

A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe,

says Blake. Though the kinds are
different, you will find that unhappiness meets you everywhere. Let us
suppose that you are in New York, in New York, the most typically
modern of great cities. Stand in a busy street during working hours, or
on a main thoroughfare at a week-end, or at a dance of an evening;
empty your mind of your own ego, and let the personalities of the
strangers about you take possession of you one after another. You will
find that each of these different crowds has its own trouble. In the
work-hour crowd you will see anxiety, excessive concentration,
dyspepsia, lack of interest in anything but the struggle, incapacity
for play, unconsciousness of their fellow creatures. On a main road at
the week-end you will see men and women, all 'comfortably off, and some
very rich, engaged in the pursuit of pleasure. This pursuit is
conducted by all at a uniform pace, that of the slowest car in the
procession; it is impossible to see the road for the cars, or the
scenery, since looking aside would cause an accident; all the occupants
of all the cars are absorbed in the desire to pass other cars, which
they cannot do on account of the crowd; if their minds wander from this
preoccupation, as will happen occasionally to those who are not
themselves driving, unutterable boredom seizes upon them and stamps
their features with trivial discontent. Once in a way a car-load of
coloured people will show genuine enjoyment, but will cause indignation
by erratic behaviour, and ultimately get into the hands of the police
owing to an accident: enjoyment in holiday time is illegal.

Or, again, watch people at a gay evening. All come determined to be
happy, with the kind of grim resolve with which one determines not to
make a fuss at the dentist's. It
is held that drink and petting are the gateways to joy, so people get
drunk quickly, and try not to notice how much their partners disgust
them. After a sufficient amount of drink, men begin to weep,
and to lament how unworthy they are, morally, of the devotion of their
mothers. All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of
sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments .
The causes of these various kinds of unhappiness lie partiy in the
social system, partly in individual psychology -- which, of course, is
itself to a considerable extent a product of the social system. I have
written before about the changes in the social system required to
promote happiness. Concerning the abolition of war, of economic
exploitation, of education in cruelty and fear, it is not my intention
to speak in this volume.
To discover a system
for the avoidance of war is a vital need for our civlisation; but no
such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual
extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of
the light of day. To prevent the perpetuation of poverty is necessary
if the benefits of machine production are to accrue in any degree to
those most in need of them; but what is the use of making everybody
rich if the rich themselvcs are miserable? Education in cruelty and
fear is bad, but no other kind can be given by those who are themselves
the slaves of these passions. These considerations lead us to the
problem of the individual: what can a man or woman, here and now, in
the midst of our nostalgic society, do to achieve happines for himself
or hetself? In discussing this problem, I shall confine my attention to
those who are not subject to any extreme cause of outward misery. I
shall assume a sufficient income to secure food and shelter, sufficient
health to make ordinary bodily activities possible. I shall not
consider the great catastrophes such as loss of all one's children, or
public disgrace. There are things to be said about such matters, and
they are important things, but they belong to a different order from
the things that I wish to say. My purpose is to suggest a cure for the
ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised
countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable bscause, having
no obviious external cause, it appears inescapable. I believe this
unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world,
mistaken 'ethics, mistaken habits of life, leading to destruction of
that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all
happiuess, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends. These are
matters which lie within the power of the individual, and I propose to
suggest the changes by which his happiness, given average good fortune,
may be achieved.

Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to
advocate will be a few words of autobiography. I was not born happy. As
a child, my favourite hymn was: 'Weary of earth and laden with my sin'.
At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I
had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I
felt the long-spreadout boredom ahead ot me to be almost unendurable.
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of
suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know
more mathematics.
Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every
year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having
discovered what were the things that I most desired and having
gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having
successfully dismissed certain objects of desire - such as the
acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other - as
essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing
preoccupation with myself.
Like others who had a Puritan educatim, I had the habit of meditating
on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself - no doubt
justly - a miserable specimen.
Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I
came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the
state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom
I felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own
possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some
direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains of these
kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that
spring from disgust with self. And every external interest inspires
some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a
complete preventive of ennui. Interest in oneself, on the contrary,
leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to the keeping
of a diary, to getting psycho-analysed, or perhaps to becoming a monk.
But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has
made him forget his own soul. The happiness which he attributes to
religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper,
provided he were compelled to remain one. External discipline is the
only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is
too profound to be cured in any other way.

The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and
various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is
one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has
come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other, and
has therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a
quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to
the activities connected with it. There is, however, a further
development which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so
completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only
distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of 'pleasure'. That
is to say he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness,
for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is
merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiuess. The narcissist
and the megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they
may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks
intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion.
In his case, the first thing to be done is to persuade him that
happhess is desirable. Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly,
are always proud of the fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the
fox who had lost his tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to
them how they can grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will
deliberately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do
not deny that such men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to
be important. I shall therefore assume that the reader would rather be
happy than unhappy. Whether I can help him to realise this wish, I do
not know; but at any rate the attempt can do no harm.

Chapter 17: The happy man

Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with
the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view
that so far as this part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a
very simple one. It is thought by many, among whom I think we must
include Mr Krutch, whom we considered in an earlier chapter, that
happiness is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious
kind. lt is thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their
sorrows have complicated and highly intellectualised sources.
I do not believe that such things are genuine causes of either
happiness or unhappiness; I think they are only symptoms. The man who
is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who
is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or
unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.
Certain things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but
these are simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful
work and the respect of one's own herd. To some people parenthood also
is essential. Where these things are lacking; only the exceptional man
can achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained
by well-directed effort, the man who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjustment
which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist,
but can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happhess, provided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavour therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the world, to aim at avoiding self-centred passions and at acquiring those affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in
ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such
passions some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin,
self-pity and self-admiration. In all these our desires are centred
upon ourselves: there is no genuine interes in the outer world, but
only a concern lest it should in some way
injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is the principal reason why men
are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round
in a warm garment of myth. But the thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the rents,
and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far more
from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the
first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at bottom
that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest some untoward event should force unwelcome realisations upon them.

What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self?
So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness,
he continues to be self-centred and therefore does not get outside the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests
adopted merely as a medicine. Although this difficulty is real, there
is nevertheless much that he can do if he has rightly diagnosed his
trouble. If, for example, his trouble is due to a sense of sin,
conscious or unconscious, he can first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful, and then proceed,
by the kind of technique that we have considered in earlier chapters,
to plant this rational conviction in his unconscious mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is probable that genuinely objective interests will arise spontaneously. If his trouble is self-pity, he can
deal with it in the same manner after first persuading himself that
there is nothing extraordinarily unfortunate in his circumstances. If
fear is his trouble, let him practise exercises designed to give
courage. Courage in war has been recognised from time immemorial
as an important virtue, and a great part of the training of boys and
young men has been devoted to producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself
every day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as
useful as the Boy Scout's daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel
that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of
course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and
intelligence. Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years
will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in
so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.
What the objective interests are to be that will arise in you when you
have overcome the disease of self-absorption must be left to the
spontaneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances. Do
not say to yourself in advance, 'I should be happy if I could become
absorbed in stamp-collecthg' and thereupon
set to work to collect stamps, for it may well happen that you will
fail altogether to find stamp collecting interesting. Only what
genuinely interests you can be of any use to you, but you may be pretty
sure that genuine objective interests will grow up as socn as you have
learnt not to be immersed in self.

The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. Professional moralists have made too much of
self-denial, and in so doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place.
Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of
what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and naturally to
the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue
could only perform by means of conscious self-denial. I have written in
this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who regards happiness
as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the point of view of
the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by
the sane moralist. The moralist, however, is too apt, though this is
not, of course, universally true, to stress the act rather than the
state of mind. The effects of an act upon the agent will be widely
different, according to his state of mind at the moment. If you see a
child drowning and save it as the result of a direct impulse to bring
help, you will emerge none the worse morally. If, on the other hand,
you say to yourself, 'It is the part of virtue to succour the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must save this child', you will be an even worse man afterwards than you were before. What applies in this extreme case applies in many other instances that are less obvious.

There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the attitude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is recommended by the traditional moralists.
The traditional moralist, for example, will say that love should be
unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one's own happiness is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that
she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it
may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we
should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an
alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and
the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial,
disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things
outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself
part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a
billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities
except that of collision. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of
disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within
the self through lack of coordination between the conscious and the
unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and
society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective
interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suffer
from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither
divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels
himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that
it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of
death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will
comeafter him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream
of life that the greatest joy is to be found.

Bertrand Russel 1950

About the Author

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British philosopher, mathematician, logician, and historian. His great span of interest and ability is easy to see in his work, which is interesting and diverse in and of it self. For his literary achievement he recieved a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and sifnigicant writings in which he champions humaitarian ideals and freefome of thought."